{"id":80,"date":"2007-11-10T15:17:01","date_gmt":"2007-11-10T20:17:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.jasonmorrison.net\/content\/2007\/how-do-you-set-up-a-php-development-environment\/"},"modified":"2007-11-10T15:17:01","modified_gmt":"2007-11-10T20:17:01","slug":"how-do-you-set-up-a-php-development-environment","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.jasonmorrison.net\/content\/2007\/how-do-you-set-up-a-php-development-environment\/","title":{"rendered":"How do you set up a PHP development environment?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"DSCN1377-1\"<\/a>Are you a budding web developer wondering where to start?\u00a0 An old hand looking for new tools?\u00a0 Let me tell you a little bit about how I do my PHP \/ web development work, and maybe some it will be of use to you.<\/p>\n

I am starting up some work on Mealographer<\/a> again.\u00a0 It definitely needs it, I did a usability test about a year ago and still haven’t fixed the issues I uncovered.\u00a0 I haven’t been doing a lot of work in PHP recently, at my day job is all Java all the time.\u00a0 I used to be happy with a text editor, a server somewhere and a browser, but since I’ve been using Eclipse I’ve become spoiled by better tools.<\/p>\n

So what do you need to get started?\u00a0 If you just want to play around, all you need is:<\/p>\n

A text editor<\/strong>.\u00a0 You can use Notepad, but I’ve used HTMLKit<\/a> in the past.\u00a0 It’s free and it does basic stuff like syntax highlighting nicely.<\/p>\n

A server<\/strong>.\u00a0 You can set everything up on a remote server, many have PHP accounts for as low as $5\/month<\/a>.\u00a0 Right now I use Site5 [referral link]<\/a>.\u00a0 I also want to give a shout out to Q5Media<\/a>, though PHP isn’t their main thing.<\/p>\n

A browser<\/strong>.\u00a0 This is pretty basic, but worth mentioning.\u00a0 You need Firefox, which is free to download.\u00a0 You’ll also want to test things in IE, which you probably already had.<\/p>\n

You can do real work with just the above.\u00a0 It’s worth taking advantage of all the great tools out there, though, including:<\/p>\n

An integrated development environment (IDE)<\/strong> – I’m pretty happy with Eclipse for Java development (or the related IBM RAD 6).\u00a0 What about for PHP?\u00a0 Right now I’m trying to decide between PHPEclispe and the PDT plugin<\/a>.\u00a0 Anyone have an opinion on which way to go?<\/p>\n

A local development server<\/strong> – If you want to run PHP locally on windows, you can install Apache or get PHP working on IIS.\u00a0 In my experience, though, you can’t beat WAMPSERVER<\/a> – it includes Apache, MySQL and PHP and makes configuration pretty easy.<\/p>\n

Source control<\/strong> – There’s no way to keep track of a project of any real size without a change management system.\u00a0 I have used CVS a lot, and SmartCVS is a good free client<\/a>.\u00a0 There are also CVS plugins for Eclipse.\u00a0 I have heard a lot of good things about Subversion<\/a> as well.<\/p>\n

Web developer plugins for Firefox<\/strong> – seriously, if you don’t have these, you might as well tie your hand behind your back when writing JavaScript of CSS.\u00a0 Here’s a good list of Firefox plugins<\/a>.<\/p>\n

So that’s what I use – what am I missing?\u00a0 Post suggestions in the comments below.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Are you a budding web developer wondering where to start?\u00a0 An old hand looking for new tools?\u00a0 Let me tell you a little bit about how I do my PHP \/ web development work, and maybe some it will be of use to you. I am starting up some work on Mealographer again.\u00a0 It definitely […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[19,118],"tags":[121,120,20,119,44,124,122,123,46],"class_list":["post-80","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog","category-programming","tag-cvs","tag-eclipse","tag-firefox","tag-ide","tag-php","tag-plugins","tag-source-control","tag-tools","tag-web-development"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jasonmorrison.net\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/80","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jasonmorrison.net\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jasonmorrison.net\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jasonmorrison.net\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jasonmorrison.net\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=80"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.jasonmorrison.net\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/80\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jasonmorrison.net\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=80"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jasonmorrison.net\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=80"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jasonmorrison.net\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=80"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}